Philip Larkin concluded one of his bittersweet lyrics with the words: “It is intensely sad.” He was referring to money. But for a century of European and English novelists, beginning with Balzac, money, however sad in the end, possessed a mercurial, life enhancing power. It might prove the ruin of poor Pere Goriot and his greedy daughters or run like a corrosive venom in the veins of Cousine Bette, but money also provided the strong and throbbing pulse of the milieu in which they worked out their sordid destinies. Money can be as abstract as a financier’s daydreams or as tangible as a beggar’s nickel; for these authors, it represented a kind of greasy poetry, enabling them to ring the changes at every level of society.

The English novelist Arnold Bennett is not much read today and that’s a shame. He writes a tough, rather dogged prose, shot through with unexpected flashes of lyricism, often inspired by the most unlikely subjects. His early novel “Anna of the Five Towns,” clearly indebted to Balzac, chronicles the insidious effect of new money not only on haves and have-nots but on the English countryside as well. What makes the novel compelling a century or so after it appeared in 1902, is the secret gusto with which Bennett conjures up the devastation wrought by greed on the landscape of his childhood. He was born and raised in Staffordshire, in that area known as The Potteries – an ancient mining and potting district made profitable by Josiah Wedgwood at the end of the 18th century.

Bennett deplores the disfigurement of the countryside wrought by the pits and ovens of the pottery trade yet he loves it too. Of one of his fictional Five Towns he writes, “Nothing could be more prosaic than the huddled, red-brown streets; nothing more seemingly remote from romance. Yet be it said that romance is even here – the romance which, for those who have an eye to perceive it, ever dwells amid the seats of industrial manufacture, softening the coarseness, transfiguring the squalor, of these mighty alchemic operations.” Anyone who has ridden or driven through the New Jersey meadowlands at sunset will recognize what Bennett means. I often used to make this trip; there was a sinister beauty in that toxic vista, punctuated by the chimneys of refineries and rank billows of indescribable color from smokestacks and steam valves made luridly spectacular by the setting sun.

Bennett’s tale would be little more than a period melodrama were it not for two factors. The first is his eye for things. His glance was drawn irresistibly to the world of objects, particularly those objects designed for some useful end: a potter’s wheel, a kiln, a mine shaft, a kitchen with all its utensils. The second is his surprisingly subtle characterization of his protagonist, Anna Tellwright. Anna is a spirited but reclusive young woman tyrannized by her skinflint father, a grasping and unscrupulous investor who begrudges his daughter’s every crust. Ephraim Tellwright had spent years as a Methodist revival preacher before amassing his riches, and there is something bitterly satirical in Bennett’s portrayal of this odious man.

Though Ephraim Tellwright is a stock figure – his lineage includes Gobseck and Silas Marner – he represents the true but hidden character of the Five Towns, with their prying and oppressive Methodism. Anna resists being evangelized; she cannot believe, and it torments her. Her independence of spirit is her salvation; through that stubborn dispassion, she slowly and painfully comes to understand the fine-grained hypocrisy of her neighbors, as fused and seamless as a Wedgwood pot.

Bennett is especially good at scenes of domestic disaster that would be comical but for their consequences. When Anna forgets to buy bacon for her father’s breakfast, the old despot punishes her for days with seething silence, and her despair is rendered so convincingly that we flinch to read of it. But Bennett is also good at evoking moments of great suggestiveness. When Anna and her suitor, the impossibly upright Henry Mynors, astute businessman and sleekly eloquent Methodist, go for a walk at night on the Isle of Man and stop at the shore, she senses he will propose to her and the fragile moment is exquisitely caught:

The uneven road to the ruined breakwater was quite deserted. Having reached the limit of the path, they stood side by side, solitary, silent, gazing at the black and gently heaving surface of the sea. The eye was foiled by the intense gloom; the ear could make nothing of the strange night-noises of the bay and ocean beyond; but the imagination was stimulated by the appeal of all this mystery and darkness. Never had the water seemed so wonderful, terrible, and austere. “We are going away tomorrow,” he said at length.

None of Anna’s hopes will be realized but at this instant, all possibility appears to unfurl as the two lovers face the vast blackness of the sea and sky.

Both Bennett’s strengths – his love of objects and his fascination with Anna’s complexities – come together in his wonderful description of her kitchen. This room, “the only satisfactory apartment in the house,” charms her suitor; its gleaming pans and neatly ordered shelves seem to incorporate all her shy but steely virtues. Bennett is in love with this kitchen, and it shows in his description of Anna’s dresser, of all things:

Seventy years of continuous polishing by a dynasty of priestesses of cleanliness had given to this dresser a rich ripe tone which the clever est trade-trickster could not have imitated. In it was reflected the conscientious labor of generations. It had a soft and assuaged appearance, as though it had never been new and could never have been new. All its corners and edges had long lost the asperities of manufacture, and its smooth surfaces were marked by slight hollows similar in spirit to those worn by the naked feet of pilgrims into the marble steps of a shrine.

The description, almost painfully adoring, goes on for another page. The dresser is an emblematic object which embodies the inconspicuous devotion of generations. Like the preposterous hat of Charles Bovary, which prefigures his grotesque and tragic future, the kitchen-dresser incorporates Anna’s character while evoking her place in the hidden but immemorial history of her milieu, now riddled by mine shafts and blazing kilns.

In “Anna of the Five Towns” Arnold Bennett rediscovered the lost country of his childhood. Five years later he would explore the same setting in “The Old Wives’ Tale,” his first true masterpiece. The singular charm of the earlier novel, for all its occasional apprentice clumsiness, is that we witness Bennett in the act of staking out his territory; asserting his claim – with astonished pride – to that scarred part of England he would make forever his.